Maybe our programming models in the future wil be so totally different that processor design as we know it will be like looking at the horse and buggy today.
They said the same thing in the 60's and 70's, after Algol (procedural language) and Simula 67 (OO language).
Yet, somehow, 30 years later we're still programming with the same concepts as in 1967!
The truth is, new ideas may come, but people don't change that quickly, and we won't be able to change the way we think very quickly either.
... then I would still be using those ancient subway tokens.
Not so fast! Tokens were discontinued for subway rides earlier this year, and all forms of cash payments (read: coins) are
to be discontinued for bus rides soon.
This, unfortunately, leaves the MetroCard as the only available option. (And aside from the privacy issues, there's the issue of not being able to board a bus without buying a MetroCard at a _subway_ stop. How logical is that?)
This has been done a long time ago (early 90s) by Zenith -- the Zenith Cruisepad
That thing had a little AMD 386 chip embedded, and ran a Citrix WinFrame client, and your PC ran a WinFrame server.
I got one recently, to play with, and tried to get it to work, but couldn't, since the Citrix SW they use only runs on windows 3.1, which I can't even find an old disk of:)
Novell has already tried this unix strategy with Unixware. They purchased the original unix team from USL (Unix System Labs), (which was there from AT&T) and had them work on Unixware.
It turned out however, that the Novell sales team only knew how to sell Netware, and Unixware got nowhere. (Wow, that almost rhymes!:) )
After about 5 years they sold the group to HP, to work on HP-UX, which kept them for another 5 years or so, and then closed the site and lay everyone off. (After they successfully ported HP-UX to the Itanium platform). C'est la vie.
This sort of stuff (actually much cooler, and actually working) has already been devloped.
Check out the various anonymous p2p storage projects here : www.scs.cs.nyu.edu
What are the other 9% thinking? Does anyone out there believe that SCO's and IBM's contractual dispute can do anything to make Linux liable in any way?
(Event SCO itself said that Linux users are not going to be liable in any case).
Its sad that some people are actually buying into this Microsoft-backed FUD.
Tap water in SoCal tastes horrible and leaves mineral deposits in my pans.
How many times do I have to tell you: humans consume liquid with the top orifice, not the bottom one. Do try to be more careful, or we might be noticed!
Whats even more interesting is that, for example, Coke is cheaper than bottled water. (Compare Coke and Dasani -- both produced by the same company, but the "flavored" water is more expensive than plain!)
In fact, bottled water seems to be the most expensive soft drink:)
because their profits were being eaten up by bureaucratic overhead as their market share migrated to the cheaper products of lean, efficient Asian companies
Lean and efficient?
Thats got nothing to do with it! What Asia has, which the US does not, is cheap labor. And that is because of a much lower standard of living.
I agree that many old US companies have way too much beurocracy. But don't become infatuated with the "efficiencies" of Asian companies -- they're able to undercut the US competition only because of extremely cheap labor.
Yes, but the point of this proposal is to take away the thing that was supposed to benefit everyone (i.e. the lane on the road), and have it benefit only the people with the most money.
So do you really expect the extra income that they get here to be used differently??
My dad works as a scientist in a lab, and has easy access to liquid nitrogen.
Some time ago we had a family of mice decide to take up residence behind our bookcases. My dad decided to take the easy way out (vs. moving the bookcase) and bring some nitrogen to flush them out.
After pouring 1/2 a thermos behind the bookcase, there was lots of smoke and commotion from behind the bookcase, but the next day the mice returned!
I guess they didn't mind it too much -- it must have dissolved too quickly to do them any real damage:)
This is silly, and not true, since there was no concept of a "teabag" in Eastern Europe.
People made tea from tea essense.
What people did do is to put a lump of sugar into their mouth as they were drinking the tea -- instead of putting it into the tea.
This was more of a matter of personal preference than desire to save sugar (although there was a little bit of both -- sugar was often given out via ration cards)
So let spammers accumulate IPv4 addresses just a little more
So, you're basically taking an anarchist view on this -- let the current system be destroyed, and the new one will arise to take its place.
But have you considered that the first step is rather painful?
I went through the same experience!
I came across a book on BASIC for kids (don't remember which one), and I wrote my programs on paper, at the age of 10.
When I got access to a computer, about a year later at summer camp (I believe it was a Vic20), instead of typing what the teacher told us to type, I brought my paper and typed in my program. It went into an infinite loop:)
(The teacher wasn't a computer whiz himself, and couldn't figure out what to press to stop it:) )
That was my first encounter with a computer bug.
I later moved on to C (by reading another book).
Now, 15 years later, I do system-level programming, did kernel programming and design, Java, some web projects on Perl and PHP etc.
So, maybe BASIC did cripple my thinking for a while (my first C programs were mostly spaghetti code, with lots of globals, etc.) But eventually I figured out the advantages of procedural, and later OO programming.
Without BASIC I don't think I could have started out creating real working programs, and proably would not have been interested in the first place.
I've submitted a dozen stories to slashdot, each rejected.
Out of those, only 1 did not appear on slashdot later.
Sometimes it seems like there's just a random number generator handling the submissions.
BTW, if you want a much more secure authentication mechanism, the Java version of the iButton will do public/private key encryption on the button, so it can be sent a challenge encrypted with your public key, and it will decrypt it with your private key and send it back to the challenger. Now that should be hard to hack.
It would also have to encode a "nonce" -- some piece of info that unpredicably changes on every challenge -- otherwise, it would be an easy subject to a replay attack : just record what the key sends once, and send it again.
But consider all the libraries which are also exectuable code.
Sure, your program only takes up 1MB of executable code, but it'll use libc, libm, etc. etc. which can add up to a lot of space.
I think the only thing helping them here is that linux code tends to be written as many separate processes to handle tasks, rather than huge monolithic programs. Therefore, each small process would be protected as it runs.
Because Intel is a hardware company.
Hardware companies solve problems in hardware.
It just never occurred to them:)
HP on the other hand, who was co-designing the Itanium, wrote an emulator called Aries which emulated HP-PA by doing runtime translation, and that worked perfectly, and at about 80% of the normal app speed.
Aries was shipped with HP-UX 11i on the orignal Itanium, and is greatly helping people transition from HP-PA machines to Itanium machines without recompiles, and no loss of performance (since Itaniums are usually faster than the PA's).
Apparently, after 10 years of hardware development of a crappy x86 emulator, Intel realized that its easier (and faster!) to do it in software.
Compilers that support interleaving can achieve parrallelism up to the number of stages on the pipeline (something ridiculus ia64 like 13 or something).
Itanium 1 had 10, Itanium 2 has something closer to 15, don't remember the exact number.
Not only do you have to fill the whole pipeline, you should also fill all the execution units for best performance. (6 execution units on the Itanium 1 -- 2 int, 2 float and 2 branch).
However, the processor tries to give you a break, and can forward results from an instruction still in the pipeline as input to an intstruction at an earlier stage (for some instructions, for some stages).
In general, compilers are just not smart enough for these sorts of architectures yet. Give them time to mature.
The headline is misleading.
Itanium has always had x86 emulation, just before it was done in hardware, and very very slowly. (The Itanium 1, at 800Mhz, ran x86 software at the speed of a 150Mhz pentium or so.)
A story at The Register, here
explains that this new software will translate some of the x86 assembly to IA-64 assembly at runtime. (See picture)
This is the same way that HP's Aries works -- which translates HP-PA instructions into IA-64.
That works pretty well actually, delivering about 80% of the nominal speed most of the time. (We've used it a lot during development of HP-UX on Itanium, and actually ran a lot of the system binaries (ls, grep, etc.) on it until they were ported. Worked pretty well!).
What they still haven't done is implement something like this in hardware, but efficiently, like Transmeta does -- they translate x86 to a RISC core in hardware, and get really good performance. But hey, this is Intel we're talking about:)
Slashdot Mirror
And the Novell guys were giving out stuffed SuSe iguana toys!! How much more co-branded can you get? :)
They said the same thing in the 60's and 70's, after Algol (procedural language) and Simula 67 (OO language). Yet, somehow, 30 years later we're still programming with the same concepts as in 1967!
The truth is, new ideas may come, but people don't change that quickly, and we won't be able to change the way we think very quickly either.
Not so fast! Tokens were discontinued for subway rides earlier this year, and all forms of cash payments (read: coins) are to be discontinued for bus rides soon.
This, unfortunately, leaves the MetroCard as the only available option. (And aside from the privacy issues, there's the issue of not being able to board a bus without buying a MetroCard at a _subway_ stop. How logical is that?)
This has been done a long time ago (early 90s) by Zenith -- the Zenith Cruisepad :)
That thing had a little AMD 386 chip embedded, and ran a Citrix WinFrame client, and your PC ran a WinFrame server.
I got one recently, to play with, and tried to get it to work, but couldn't, since the Citrix SW they use only runs on windows 3.1, which I can't even find an old disk of
It turned out however, that the Novell sales team only knew how to sell Netware, and Unixware got nowhere. (Wow, that almost rhymes!
After about 5 years they sold the group to HP, to work on HP-UX, which kept them for another 5 years or so, and then closed the site and lay everyone off. (After they successfully ported HP-UX to the Itanium platform). C'est la vie.
This sort of stuff (actually much cooler, and actually working) has already been devloped.
Check out the various anonymous p2p storage projects here : www.scs.cs.nyu.edu
What are the other 9% thinking? Does anyone out there believe that SCO's and IBM's contractual dispute can do anything to make Linux liable in any way?
(Event SCO itself said that Linux users are not going to be liable in any case).
Its sad that some people are actually buying into this Microsoft-backed FUD.
Turning on all warnings in gcc (-Wall) catches this, and many other common errors.
(In effect it does a lint-like check on the source.)
How many times do I have to tell you: humans consume liquid with the top orifice, not the bottom one. Do try to be more careful, or we might be noticed!
Whats even more interesting is that, for example, Coke is cheaper than bottled water. :)
(Compare Coke and Dasani -- both produced by the same company, but the "flavored" water is more expensive than plain!)
In fact, bottled water seems to be the most expensive soft drink
You've got to be kidding me!!!
Lean and efficient?
Thats got nothing to do with it! What Asia has, which the US does not, is cheap labor. And that is because of a much lower standard of living.
I agree that many old US companies have way too much beurocracy. But don't become infatuated with the "efficiencies" of Asian companies -- they're able to undercut the US competition only because of extremely cheap labor.
Yes, but the point of this proposal is to take away the thing that was supposed to benefit everyone (i.e. the lane on the road), and have it benefit only the people with the most money.
So do you really expect the extra income that they get here to be used differently??
My dad works as a scientist in a lab, and has easy access to liquid nitrogen. :)
Some time ago we had a family of mice decide to take up residence behind our bookcases. My dad decided to take the easy way out (vs. moving the bookcase) and bring some nitrogen to flush them out.
After pouring 1/2 a thermos behind the bookcase, there was lots of smoke and commotion from behind the bookcase, but the next day the mice returned!
I guess they didn't mind it too much -- it must have dissolved too quickly to do them any real damage
People made tea from tea essense.
What people did do is to put a lump of sugar into their mouth as they were drinking the tea -- instead of putting it into the tea.
This was more of a matter of personal preference than desire to save sugar (although there was a little bit of both -- sugar was often given out via ration cards)
So, you're basically taking an anarchist view on this -- let the current system be destroyed, and the new one will arise to take its place.
But have you considered that the first step is rather painful?
I went through the same experience! :) :) )
I came across a book on BASIC for kids (don't remember which one), and I wrote my programs on paper, at the age of 10.
When I got access to a computer, about a year later at summer camp (I believe it was a Vic20), instead of typing what the teacher told us to type, I brought my paper and typed in my program. It went into an infinite loop
(The teacher wasn't a computer whiz himself, and couldn't figure out what to press to stop it
That was my first encounter with a computer bug.
I later moved on to C (by reading another book). Now, 15 years later, I do system-level programming, did kernel programming and design, Java, some web projects on Perl and PHP etc.
So, maybe BASIC did cripple my thinking for a while (my first C programs were mostly spaghetti code, with lots of globals, etc.) But eventually I figured out the advantages of procedural, and later OO programming.
Without BASIC I don't think I could have started out creating real working programs, and proably would not have been interested in the first place.
I've submitted a dozen stories to slashdot, each rejected.
Out of those, only 1 did not appear on slashdot later.
Sometimes it seems like there's just a random number generator handling the submissions.
It would also have to encode a "nonce" -- some piece of info that unpredicably changes on every challenge -- otherwise, it would be an easy subject to a replay attack : just record what the key sends once, and send it again.
But consider all the libraries which are also exectuable code.
Sure, your program only takes up 1MB of executable code, but it'll use libc, libm, etc. etc. which can add up to a lot of space.
I think the only thing helping them here is that linux code tends to be written as many separate processes to handle tasks, rather than huge monolithic programs. Therefore, each small process would be protected as it runs.
Which universe are you from?
I hope you mean km/s
Because Intel is a hardware company. :)
Hardware companies solve problems in hardware.
It just never occurred to them
HP on the other hand, who was co-designing the Itanium, wrote an emulator called Aries which emulated HP-PA by doing runtime translation, and that worked perfectly, and at about 80% of the normal app speed. Aries was shipped with HP-UX 11i on the orignal Itanium, and is greatly helping people transition from HP-PA machines to Itanium machines without recompiles, and no loss of performance (since Itaniums are usually faster than the PA's).
Apparently, after 10 years of hardware development of a crappy x86 emulator, Intel realized that its easier (and faster!) to do it in software.
Itanium 1 had 10, Itanium 2 has something closer to 15, don't remember the exact number.
Not only do you have to fill the whole pipeline, you should also fill all the execution units for best performance. (6 execution units on the Itanium 1 -- 2 int, 2 float and 2 branch).
However, the processor tries to give you a break, and can forward results from an instruction still in the pipeline as input to an intstruction at an earlier stage (for some instructions, for some stages).
In general, compilers are just not smart enough for these sorts of architectures yet. Give them time to mature.
Itanium has always had x86 emulation, just before it was done in hardware, and very very slowly. (The Itanium 1, at 800Mhz, ran x86 software at the speed of a 150Mhz pentium or so.)
A story at The Register, here explains that this new software will translate some of the x86 assembly to IA-64 assembly at runtime. (See picture)
This is the same way that HP's Aries works -- which translates HP-PA instructions into IA-64.
That works pretty well actually, delivering about 80% of the nominal speed most of the time. (We've used it a lot during development of HP-UX on Itanium, and actually ran a lot of the system binaries (ls, grep, etc.) on it until they were ported. Worked pretty well!).
What they still haven't done is implement something like this in hardware, but efficiently, like Transmeta does -- they translate x86 to a RISC core in hardware, and get really good performance. :)
But hey, this is Intel we're talking about
There are Java code obfuscation programs that'll make the decompiled source look almost like assembler.